basicincome.co is a first attempt at providing a decentralized safety net Network that can compete with the state. it uses an incentive-structure that´s the exact opposite of current tax-collection.

Imagine if you took your insurance company, breed it with kickstarter, mixed in some reward mechanisms and added a bit of Martin Luther King. Voila. A free market, incentive-based, welfare system.

Could you tell me more about this whole incentive structure ?

Incentives is the hard problem. If force isn´t an option, how do you get people and corporations to contribute to the social security a safety net offers ? The problem is not as hard as it might sound. To get some perspective, think about how incentive-centered design has transformed other financial platforms in the recent years. Think about crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is not a tool but a paradigm shift which creates a disruptive challenge and a new dimension to the world economy. And then there´s Bitcoin-like systems, that use incentive-driven miners to maintain the network. Dana Edwards included a section about this in his whitepaper - Attraction by incentive rather than coercive force (Incentive-centered design protocol).

The incentive layer I´ve designed is simple, yet powerful: if a person or corporation consumes from someone outside the network, they get disconnected. Only temporarily. If they buy for $100 from someone outside the network, they get disconnected for the duration it takes for $100 in dividends to flow through them.

This is very meta and recursive because if a node gets disconnected, all their consumers also get disconnected, and so on. Which means that staying connected will make a node extremely attractive to others who want to stay connected.

The entire system is built to scale up from the positive altruistic goodwill that runs throughout society, it´s a sort of positive pyramid scheme.

How did you come up with the idea?I studied medical science in my early 20s, and reflected a lot on Robert Karasek´s theories of occupational stress and employ control. I then drifted into basic income philosophy, and began to write about my ideas of basic income and memetics, and how the ability to say no has a profound positive impact on overall quality of life.

Then 2 years ago, I discovered Ripple, an open-source financial platform with an open API. That empowered me as a creative because I could build on their platform without having to go through a bunch of bureaucrats. So, I began sketching out my concept of dividend pathways, and then added my incentive-layer idea. Then I put the whole thing on ice for a while after a brake up, and returned to it in may 2014.

There is currently a fundraiser at Indiegogo, what are you planningto do with the money?My work is to push this technology and these ideas out there, and to compete in the marketplace of time and attention. The campaign is my first attempt at becoming a commercial force, and the backers will help grow the company. The company will be able to support a larger team of developers, and just be much better at it´s work with creating this technology.

The past 6 months have gone into developing prototypes and media content. The money we raise from this campaign will be invested in developing a more scalable server architecture, as well as the development of stand alone apps that provide extended support for coins outside the Ripple ecosystem, and the next release will support BitCoin, Ethereum, NXT, Ripple, and will provide APIs that simplify the process of integrating new coins with the Basicincome.co application.

With the help of you backers, we´ll be able to finish this technology this year, 2015, and we believe that our incentive-based peer-to-peer safety net system will be a key technology for the society of the future. Basicincome.co will continue to be an open-source and creative commons asset, and the innovations that we put online will probably come to change the world in ways very similar to the TCP/IP protocols that gave birth to the internet 30 years ago.